Jelly imagined her beloved concerto ready to sound its marvels in Berlin; more imprisoned now, in front of a capacity crowd swelled by Nazi dignitaries, than it had ever been while cocooned in its safe, quiet file in the Prussian State Library. She didn’t want to hear it at all. She escaped to the Green Room with some magazines to wait until it was over.

‘Didn’t you want to know what he’s done with it?’ Alec asked, astonished to find Jelly there a little later, lying on the chaise longue and leafing through the latest Vogue, circling dress designs she liked.

‘Yes,’ said Jelly, without flinching, ‘but not yet. He’ll record it, for sure. I’ll hear it sometime – after I’ve played it.’

‘You might be interested to hear,’ Alec said gently, ‘that Goebbels made a speech. Then Kulenkampff played the concerto. And now they’re all singing rousing nationalistic songs together with their Führer.’

Jelly’s magazine slid to the floor. ‘What did Goebbels say?’

‘The usual.’ Alec picked up Vogue and placed its bright colours face down on the chaise longue. ‘It’s not your fault, you know. You could never have imagined this when it all began.’

Jelly, usually so swift to tears, could find none. She couldn’t let the import of what had happened drill through her shell, or…

‘There, there, old girl.’ Alec patted her arm. ‘I’ll leave you in peace.’

She sat still, listening to his steps fading on the stairs. Her Sleeping Beauty had been awakened by the wrong prince. Could the spirits not see into the future? Could they not have known, when they chose to speak through the glass game, that the first person on whose ear the concerto would fall might be Adolf Hitler?

‘They don’t tell us what will happen,’ Adila affirmed that evening, ‘only what is, with their wider perspective.’ Erik had arrived after dinner; Jelly found them all in the music room, drinking coffee, the baron looking as shattered as Jelly felt. ‘Even then, they’re sometimes wrong. Several times this has happened.’

‘Do you remember, they thought we should look in Weimar?’

‘Yes, and one of them said, “My child, we do not know everything,”’ said Erik.

‘The spirits are only human,’ said Adila.

‘There’s no reason why a spirit fallible in life shouldn’t also be fallible after life,’ Alec remarked, his eyes smiling above his moustache. ‘They’re the same people, one presumes… ’

‘Erik.’ Jelly rounded on the baron. ‘Why is there nothing from them now?’

‘I wish I knew.’ Erik’s gaze, like Alec’s, like Adila’s, was full of sympathy – and more, perhaps fear or guilt.